Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Chez Bryony Vandenesse to Pont d'Ouche

Dave, having only yesterday discovered that he could open all the windows of his car if he sat on the "unlock" button of the key for long enough, busied himself in the earlier part of the morning by opening and closing the windows from the comfort of the breakfast table. The rest of us decided if there was to be sufficient battery power left in the car to get it started, we should put an end to this behaviour by leaving as early as possible, which fortunately coincided with exactly the time I had previously arranged with the lock keepers two days before.

Perhaps it was that we were still quite full of yesterday's lunch that there seemed little point in pushing ourselves too hard, or perhaps that we just don't see a lot of point in pushing ourselves at all, but the village at Pont d'Ouche was almost eight kilometres away and we saw little point in not stopping there.

We actually had barely finished our morning coffee by the time we arrived at the eccentric little harbour run by the almost eccentric Bryony, with her eclectic mix of umbrellas tents and sheds seemingly all branded "Chez Bryony - English Spoken", from which she cheerily dispatches her own brand of Franco-English hospitality to anyone who requests it, or who passes close enough to have it foist upon them.

Our travelling eclusier couldn't believe his luck when we told him where we were going to stop for the day.

"But we will be stopped before lunch-time" he remarked with eyebrows raised in mock incredulity.

"Then we both get to sleep all afternoon." I replied to his amusement, and while we didn't quite achieve that objective, we did spend a grand portion of the afternoon sitting in the shade, listening to the dull whine of a pair of British friends updating their last few years of adventures, while our crew quietly absented themselves by bicycle, returning some hours later with a car which did not fail to start despite Dave's earlier efforts.

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